Making of Late Antiquity, The
Peter Brown
Number of quotes: 44
Book ID: 251 Page: 8/9
Section: 4B
In that case, we must be careful to avoid melodramatic insistence on sudden and widespread changes in the climate of religious belief in the Mediterranean world of the second and third centuries. Instead, we have to make the considerable imaginative leap of entering into a world where religion was taken absolutely for granted and belief in the supernatural occasioned far less excitement than we might at first sight suppose. Mediterranean men shared their world with invisible beings, largely more powerful than themselves, to whom they had to relate. They did this with the same sense of unavoidable obligation as they experienced in wide areas of their relations with more visible neighbors.
Quote ID: 6269
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 251 Page: 12
Section: 4B
In the period between 200 and 400, Mediterranean men came to accept, in increasing numbers and with increasing enthusiasm, the idea that this “divine power” did not only manifest itself directly to the average individual or through perennially established institutions: rather “divine power” was represented on earth by a limited number of exceptional human agents, who had been empowered to bring it to bear among their fellows by reason of a relationship with the supernatural that was personal to them, stable and clearly perceptible to fellow believers.
Quote ID: 6271
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 251 Page: 13
Section: 4B
Let us, therefore, compare the two ages, between which the shift in the locus of the supernatural became increasingly apparent. In about 400, the direct descendants of men who, in the age of Antonines, had placed their hopes in times of illness on the invisible and timeless Asclepius, a kindly figure of their dream world, turned in increasing numbers to visible, mortal human beings to whom God had “transferred” the power of healing. {38}
Quote ID: 6272
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 251 Page: 13/14
Section: 2E2,4B
A society prepared to vest fellow humans with such powers was ever vigilant. Men watched each other closely for those signs of intimacy with the supernatural that would validate their claim. Holiness itself might be quantifiable. Symeon Stylites, we are told, touched his toes 1,244 times in bowing before God from the top of his column. The true horror of this story lies not in the exertions of the saint, but in the layman who stood there counting. {40}Agents of the supernatural existed and could be seen to exist.
. . . Literary portraiture in the form of biography and autobiography flourished: the Acts of the Martyrs; Eusebius’ Life of Constantine, . . .Athanasius’ Life of Anthony; Augustine’s Confessions. . .
Quote ID: 6273
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 251 Page: 16
Section: 4B
What gives Late Antiquity its special flavor is precisely the claims of human beings.
Quote ID: 6274
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 251 Page: 20
Section: 3A4
The sorcerer was merely a paradigm of the supernatural power misapplied in society; and the criteria used to judge the source and exercise of such power involved issues that were far from being purely theological.Pastor John’s Note: i.e. civic duties were expected of the good.
Quote ID: 6277
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 251 Page: 25
Section: 2E2
We meet, in the egregious Peregrinus, the most faithful portrait of a second-century charismatic teacher in the Christian communities, {85} but not Peregrinus the civic benefactor.
Quote ID: 6284
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 251 Page: 28
Section: 4B
One singular merit, among so many, of Geffcken’s Ausgang des griechisch-rӧmischen Heidentums is that his profound epigraphic knowledge led him to assign a precise moment to the end of civic paganism. The inscriptions proclaiming public allegiance and whole-hearted private support to the cults of the traditional gods of the city, which had struck Geffcken as quite unexpectedly numerous in the late second and early third centuries, wither away within a generation after A.D. 260. The Tetrarchic age sees a brief, diminished, flare-up, and then the darkness descends forever on the gods. {8}Pastor John’s Note: Then, if a bishop stepped in to fill the civic void, the people would have seen in him a return to the ancient, stable norm.
Quote ID: 6286
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 251 Page: 31
Section: 4B
“Philotimia: No word understood to its depths goes further to explain the Greco-Roman achievement.” {19} This was the driving force behind those more vague emotions--”patriotism,” “archaism,” “vanity”--that we ascribe to Antonine men. It had remained an explosive substance. On the one hand, it committed members of the upper class to a blatant competitiveness on all levels of social life.. . . .
On the other hand, the competitiveness of philotimia, still assumed and needed, as it had done for centuries, an audience of significant others who were potential competitors.
. . . .
In such a context, Galen’s rich man would move from stage to stage of his career, in each seeking out a peer group with whom he could meaningfully compare himself {21}
. . . .
The phenomena that distinguished the society of the Later Empire -- a sharpening of the division between the classes, the impoverishment of the town councillors and the accumulation of wealth and status into ever fewer hands -- were the most predictable developments in the social history of the Roman world. They were well under way by A.D. 200. {22}
Quote ID: 6287
Time Periods: 014
Book ID: 251 Page: 32
Section: 4B
“Yet there are others, Chians, Galatians or Bithynians, who are not content with whatever portion of either repute or power among their fellow-countrymen has fallen to their lot, but weep because they do not wear the patrician shoe.” {27} Indeed, of all the developments in the social history of the Roman Empire, the process by which local families from the larger cities of the Greek East in the fourth century were drained upwards and away to the senate and court of Constantinople, leaving behind them a rump of resentful and vociferously impoverished colleagues, is the most predictable. {28}
Quote ID: 6288
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 251 Page: 33
Section: 4B
Faced by tensions that were clearly pulling the local community out of shape, urban elites all over the Empire appear to have strenuously mobilized the resources of their traditional culture, their traditional religious life, and for those who had good reason to afford it, their traditional standards of generosity in order to maintain some sense of communal solidarity.
Quote ID: 6289
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 251 Page: 34
Section: 4B
At no time in the ancient world were the cultural and religious aspects of the public life of the towns mere trappings which the urban elites could or could not afford, and which, therefore, they found themselves forced to dispense with after A.D. 260. . . Cultural and social attitudes were intimately interwoven in the style of urban life.
Quote ID: 6291
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 251 Page: 34
Section: 3B,4B
. . .to move from the age of the Antonines to the age of Constantine is not to pass through some moment of catastrophic breakdown, of bankruptcy, depletion, pauperization, and the consequent “cutting back” of expenditure on religious and cultural activity but rather to pass from one dominant lifestyle, and its forms of expression, to another; to pass, in fact, from an age of equipoise to an age of ambition.
Quote ID: 6292
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 251 Page: 35
Section: 4B
The age of the Antonines . . . Put at its most material, to lavish funds on the public cults was a way of insuring oneself against envy and competition. The benefactor gave over wealth to the gods who, as invisible and immortal, stood for all that could be shared by the community.
Quote ID: 6294
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 251 Page: 36
Section: 4B
Later still, in the fifteenth century, the rise to outright dominance of the Medici in Florence was cannily masked by the erection of vast Catholic shrines.{36} Such precautions were taken for granted in the second century A.D.
Quote ID: 6295
Time Periods: 27
Book ID: 251 Page: 39
Section: 4B
Ideals of unaffected friendship relations and of power exercised without pomp and circumstance were valued in the age of the Antonines, and they continued to be cherished in many circles throughout Late Antiquity {51}
Quote ID: 6297
Time Periods: 27
Book ID: 251 Page: 45/46
Section: 4B
In the third century, the life of the upper classes of the Roman world did not collapse under pressure outside: it exploded.
Quote ID: 6298
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 251 Page: 49/50
Section: 1A,4B
By assuming that paganism withered away, and that it was immediately replaced by Christianity, we ignore a large, and fascinating, tract of Late Roman religious life: paganism was transformed by being linked to a new ceremonial of power.
Quote ID: 6305
Time Periods: 245
Book ID: 251 Page: 50/51
Section: 3B
There was, therefore, nothing new, much less artificial, about Diocletian’s solemn consultation of the oracles before the persecution of the Christians {101} or in his linking of himself with the traditional cults in monuments as far apart as Rome, Thessalonica, and Ephesus. {102} What was lacking, however, was the seemingly unflagging zeal with which members of the local community collaborated with such displays.
Quote ID: 6307
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 251 Page: 52
Section: 3C2
The evolution we have sketched out in a few tentative strokes lies behind the failure of Julian. In a great city such as Antioch, the ceremonial of the potentes had come to mean more than the ceremonies of the gods. Julian had given funds to the city for collective sacrifice: “Accordingly, I hastened thither . . . thinking that I should enjoy the sight of your wealth and public spirit. And I imagined . . . the sort of procession it would be . . . beasts for sacrifice, libations, choirs in honor of the gods, incense and the youth of the city surrounding the shrine.” {111} But when he arrived, he found an old priest and his goose. The Antiochenes had spent the money on chariot racing. They had invested in that ceremonial of power and good fortune in which the cities of the eastern Empire crystallized a new, more secular, sense of stability and triumph. {112}
Quote ID: 6308
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 251 Page: 53
Section: 3C2
By the reign of Theodosius II this ceremonial of power would focus on the potens par excellence of Byzantium -- the emperor himself. The defeat of Julian at Antioch was not a victory of the Christian church. It was the victory of a Late Antique mentality and style of life that would blossom, in a hauntingly non-Christian form, in the ceremonial of the Hippodrome of Constantinople. {114}
Quote ID: 6309
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 251 Page: 55/56
Section: 2A3,2C,4B
The martyrs were not merely protesters against conventional religion, nor were they particularly noteworthy as men and women who faced execution with unusual courage: as the notables of Smyrna told a later bishop, they were too used to professional stars of violence – to gladiators and beast hunters – to be unduly impressed by those who made a performance out of making light of death. {8} Rather, the martyrs stood for a particular style of religious experience. “The primitive Christians,” wrote Gibbon, “perpetually trod on mystic ground.” {9} The Christians admired their martyrs because they had made themselves the “friends of God”; they summed up in their persons the aspirations of a group made separate from, and far superior to, their fellow men by reason of a special intimacy with the divine.The rise of the Christian church in the late second and third centuries is the rise of a body of men led by self-styled “friends of God,” who claimed to have found dominance over the “earthly” forces of their world through a special relation to heaven.
. . . .
Friendship with God raised the Christians above the identity they shared with their fellows. The nomen Christianum they flaunted was a “non-name.” It excluded the current names of kin and township and pointed deliberately to a widening hole in the network of social relations by which other inhabitants of the Roman towns were still content to establish their identity: “He resisted them with such determination that he would not even tell them his own name, his race, or the city he was from, whether he was a slave or a freedman. To all their questions he answered in Latin: ‘I am a Christian!’” {10}
Quote ID: 6310
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 251 Page: 57
Section: 3A3A
In the late second and third centuries, the Christians became figures to be reckoned with in the Roman world. They did so largely because they had a singularly articulate and radical contribution to make to that great debate, whose outlines were sketched in that first chapter, on the manner in which supernatural power could be exercised in society. The way in which the Christians idealized their martyrs as the special “friends of God,” and the manner in which they organized themselves around bishops who claimed with increasing assertiveness to be “friends of God” in a similar manner, condensed the main issues of that debate. In following through this theme, we can make some sense of the tantalizing evidence for the position of the Christian church in the Mediterranean world in the century before the conversion of Constantine.. . . .
Far less than we might wish can be said with certainty about the pre-Constantinian church. Its numbers and rate of expansion are likely to remain forever obscure.
Quote ID: 6311
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 251 Page: 58
Section: 3B
Even in a village near Oxyrhynchus, a Christian church had doors of bronze substantial enough to be confiscated and transported all the way to Alexandria in 303. {21}
Quote ID: 6312
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 251 Page: 58/59
Section: 4B
A growing certainty that “friends of God” could exist and could be seen to exist in this world and that their friendship with God entitled them to considerable and permanent powers over their neighbors becomes ever more clear from the mid-third century onwards. At just this period, the equipoise of the Antonine age collapsed. At a time when the “model of parity” was sapped by the tendency of a few members of the local community to enjoy a privileged status at the expense of their fellows, religious leaders emerged, and were encouraged to emerge, in pagan and Christian circles alike, who were prepared to stand out from their fellows in a far more blatant eminence than previously.
Quote ID: 6313
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 251 Page: 63
Section: 3C
Though they receive great prominence in modern scholarship, the visions that accompanied his conversion in 312 were no more than passing incidents in a lifelong style of relationship with the supernatural: as befitted a “friend of God,” he was recipient of ten thousand such heartening visitations.
Quote ID: 6317
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 251 Page: 63
Section: 3B,4B
On one feature, all Late Antique men were agreed. Friendship with the invisible great had the same consequences as friendship with the great of this world: it meant far more than intimacy; it meant power.
Quote ID: 6318
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 251 Page: 64/65
Section: 2C,4B
In a society that knew all about the immediate social effects of friendship and patronage, the emergence of men and women who claimed intimate relations with invisible patrons meant far more than the rise of a tender religiosity of personal experience, and more than the groping of lonely men for invisible companionship. It meant that yet another form of “power” was available for the inhabitants of a Mediterranean city.The problems that Late Antique men faced, therefore, were not whether such power existed, nor whether it rested solely in the Christian church. The power had to be focused and its apparently random distribution canalized trenchantly and convincingly onto a definite class of individuals and a definitive institution. Hence the importance of the rise of the Christian bishop in the third century, and of the Christian holy man in the fourth century.
In the second century, the boundaries between the human and the divine had remained exceptionally fluid. The religious language of the age is the language of an open frontier. . .
Quote ID: 6319
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 251 Page: 66
Section: 1A,2D3B
In the late second century, the philosopher was jostled by the sorcerer, and the Christian bishop by the Montanist prophetess.
Quote ID: 6321
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 251 Page: 67
Section: 2D3B
Possession lay at the heart of the early Christian communities.. . . .
Above all, true prophets were men and women who could be observed to surrender all personal initiative. It was the “pseudo-prophet” who kept his wits about him and built up a private practice.
Quote ID: 6322
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 251 Page: 67/68
Section: 2D3A
For all his drastic claims, the Paraclete of the Montanists emerged as a fussy and old-fashioned martinet, ministering to the anxieties of small, puritanical groups who felt that they lived on the edge of a very slippery slope.COPIED
Quote ID: 6323
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 251 Page: 68/69
Section: 2B2,3C
The outstanding man did not only have a stronger invisible protector. His intimate friendship with that protector verged on the merging of their identities. In 240 the young Mani began on his career as a visionary after such contact with his heavenly Twin: “I made him mine, as my very own.” {50} In 310, Constantine prepared for his conquest with a vision of his Apollo: “You saw him and recognized yourself in him . . . young and gay, a bringer of salvation and of exceeding beauty.” {51}
Quote ID: 6325
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 251 Page: 73
Section: 4B
The Christian teachers offered a view of man and the world that cut many of the Gordian knots of social living in a manner that was all the more convincing for being safely symbolic.
Quote ID: 6328
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 251 Page: 80
Section: 2E2
In Egypt, Anthony, the “man of God” had passed through the early trials of his ascetic life before Constantine fought the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312; Pachomius had founded his first community at Tabennisi a few years before Constantine gained control of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire in 324. In the making of Late Antiquity, the monks of Egypt played a role more enduring than that of Constantine.
Quote ID: 6333
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 251 Page: 83/84
Section: 2E2
“‘He who dwells with brethren’ said Abba Matoes ‘must be not square, but round, so as to turn himself toward all.’ He went on: ‘It is not through virtue that I live in solitude, but through weakness; those who live in the midst of men are the strong ones.’” {8} Yet detachment was out of the question. For economic insecurity, the demands of taxation and the ineluctable discipline of the Water, the need to cooperate in order to control the precious water of the Nile, forced households of natural egotists into constant, humiliating, and friction-laden contact and collaboration with their fellows.
Quote ID: 6334
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 251 Page: 84/85
Section: 2E2
At exactly the same period, however, when farmers might have expected to make their own way, unrestrained by their neighbors, they found themselves thrown back upon each other by the increased weight of taxation, which rested on the village as a whole. Thus, in the generation when the individual might have hoped to “go it alone” more successfully than ever before, the tensions and frictions of communal living reasserted themselves in a particularly abrasive manner. Disengagement, anachoresis, was the reflex reaction of Egyptian farmers in a difficult position.
Quote ID: 6335
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 251 Page: 85
Section: 2E2
In the cities, Christianity had already evolved a language of disengagement. It was in a Christian church that Anthony found an answer to the thoughts which had already begun to trouble him: “He chanced to be on his way to church. As he was walking along, he collected he thoughts and reflected how the Apostles left everything and followed the Savior.” {15} Hence the enduring appeal of the holy man of ascetic origin to the peasant societies of the Late Antique Mediterranean. In his act of anachoresis he had summed up the logical resolution of a dilemma with which the average farmer, and more especially the average successful farmer, could identify himself wholeheartedly:...Pastor John notes: John’s Notes: In other words, he just quit.
Quote ID: 6336
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 251 Page: 86
Section: 2E2
His powers and his prestige came from acting out, heroically, before a society enmeshed in oppressive obligations and abrasive relationships, the role of the utterly self-dependent, autarkic man. {17}
Quote ID: 6337
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 251 Page: 86
Section: 2E2
The anachoresis of the fourth-century hermit took place in a world that was exceptionally sensitive to its social meaning. It was a gesture that had originated in tensions between man and man; and the ascetic message derived its cogency from having resolved those tensions.
Quote ID: 6338
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 251 Page: 93
Section: 2E2
The stance of the monks was a crushing rebuke to the religious style of the pagan world. A studied rejection of the usual manner of wielding power in society from supernatural sources completed the process of anachoresis. The monks sidestepped the ambivalences involved in claims to exercise “heavenly” power in “earthly” regions. They defined “heavenly” power quite simply as power that was not to be used...
Quote ID: 6339
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 251 Page: 97
Section: 4B
Two generations only separate the outstanding career of Cyprian from the reign of Constantine and the anachoresis of Anthony and Pachomius. In this short time, a long “debate on the holy” was brought to a close. The outlines of the situation that characterized Late Antiquity had emerged. A special class of men had come to wield growing power in Roman society by reason of their exceptional relationship with the supernatural.
Quote ID: 6340
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 251 Page: 97/98
Section: 4B
Yet the growing clarity that becomes so marked a feature of the late third and fourth centuries was gained at a heavy cost. A wide range of alternatives came to be closed. This closing of alternatives is only indirectly associated with the rise of Christianity and the decline of paganism. Instead, we sense that the koine of Mediterranean religious experience as a whole has shifted in an insensible tide that washed all its shores and has touched all its inhabitants. Pagans and Christians alike took up a new stance to another “style” of religious life, in which expectations of what human beings could achieve in relation to the supernatural had changed subtly and irreversibly from the age of the Antonines. The change cut off the Christian church quite as much from its own past as from its pagan contemporaries. A new form of Christian religiosity ratified the new position of Christian leaders in Roman society.
Quote ID: 6341
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 251 Page: 100
Section: 3A4,3C
The Christians looked to the earth alone. They claimed power from heaven; but they had made that heaven remote and they kept its power to themselves, to build up new separate institutions among upstart heroes on earth. Such institutions had been hastily thrown up by men for men.. . . .
The “stars” that held the attention of a fourth-century Christian were the tombs of the martyrs, scattered like the Milky Way throughout the Mediterranean. {76}
Quote ID: 6343
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 251 Page: 101
Section: 2E2
Yet Iamblichus was wrong in one point. The final blow came, not from the philosophical scruples of Porphyry, but from the anachoresis of the monks of Egypt. The new heroes and leaders of the Christian church came to stand between heaven and an earth emptied of the gods.
Quote ID: 6344
Time Periods: 4
End of quotes